At the time of the present patent application demand for increased data capacity and efficiency in Internet traffic continues to increase dramatically as more individuals and businesses increase their use of the Internet. The ever-increasing demand also drives development of equipment for the Internet such as data packet routers. A number of enterprises are developing routers that are capable of faster and higher capacity handling of data packets.
The Internet, operating globally, comprises components from a wide variety of companies and organizations. It is, of course, necessary that such equipment conform to certain hardware and connection standards and operate by certain data transfer standards and protocols. These standards are all well known to the skilled artisan.
As new and better equipment for routing data traffic in the Internet continues to be developed, researchers developing such equipment are including fault tolerance, diagnostic capabilities, and redundancy into the equipment, links between instances of routing equipment, and in routing protocols. At the time of the present patent application, for example, there exist redundancy systems for data traffic between routers, generally termed Automatic Protection Switching (APS) in the art. APS is described in more detail as it exists in the art below, under the section entitled “Description of the Preferred Embodiments”.
One of the important developments in Internet technology as of the time of filing of the present patent application is in development of faster, and scalable routers. The present inventors, for example, are involved in development of what are known in the art as Terabit routers, capable of much higher packet transfer rates than currently available in the art.
It is highly desirable in new and faster routers to make very quick switchover to alternate routing paths if there should be a failure, impeding flow of data packets. The need for quick reaction is quite simply the fact that many packets (much data) is lost with slower switchover. It is therefore desirable to have a quick hardware temporary solution in the event of component failure, followed by a more complete software solution, and then eventual repair. It is to this need for quick reaction to partial failure in routers, that is, failure of individual paths and components, to which the present application is addressed. The inventors have developed apparatus and methods for addressing this need.